Foiling those evil Grinches

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How goes the annual battle to delete
Christmas from schools and the public
square? News is mixed, but on the whole,
things are not going well for the Grinches. In
New Jersey, for example, the Hanover
Township school district said it was
considering a ban on Christmas carols and
other religious songs at school concerts.
Parents protested and threatened to sue, so
the school board beat a hasty retreat. "If a school wants religious music,
they can have it, the way they could before," said the school board president.

The key phrase here is
"threatened to sue." In
the old days, when an
American Civil
Liberties Union lawyer
would show up to
hammer some tiny
school board into
submission, the legal
costs of resisting were
so high that the boards
usually caved in. Now
the anti-Grinches have
legal muscle of their
own. The
Arizona-based Alliance
Defense Fund, which
supported the Hanover parents, claims to have 700 lawyers ready to fight
anti-Christmas assaults around the country. The ADF
(alliancedefensefund.org) played a lead role in blocking an attempt by the
ACLU and the Anti-Defamation League to force a charter school in Elbert
County, Colo., to ban religious songs from its holiday concert. The
Anti-Defamation League said the school's program was harming the sense of
well-being of Jewish students. But how harmful can it be to sing six
Christmas carols, two Hanukkah songs, and a lot of ditties about Rudolph
and Frosty?

In Plano, Texas, a school district refused to allow a third grader at a class
party to hand out candy canes with a religious message attached. The
Liberty Legal Institute (libertylegal.org) and the ADF jumped in last week and
demanded that the district back down, arguing that "public schools are not
zones of religious censorship."

The Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, Mich. (www .thomasmore.org),
supported a parent's legal challenge to the New York City public schools'
policy that allows the Islamic star and crescent and the Jewish menorah
(which the Anti-Defamation League concedes is a religious symbol) but not
Christian religious symbols such as a Nativity display. The schools'
chancellor offered a tortured argument in court: The menorah has a "secular
dimension" large enough to qualify as nonreligious. The judge, who was
caustic about the school policy during arguments, is expected to rule any
day.

A similar suit against the town of Palm Beach in Florida, also supported by
the Thomas More Law Center, argues that the town cannot ban Nativity
scenes on a prominent site where the menorah is displayed. Again, the
menorah isn't simply secular. More important, the Supreme Court allows
Nativity scenes on public property if they do not dominate and are part of a
broader cultural display.

Offensive. At Central Michigan University, the affirmative action office warned
Christians that Christmas "may be offensive to others within a place of
employment." No such warning was issued about the potential dangers of
Hanukkah or Kwanzaa. The Catholic League (catholicleague.org) made a
fuss about it and alerted Fox News Channel, which has been aggressively
covering this season's anti-Christmas campaign. Central Michigan dropped
the warning.

A new twist in the Christmas wars is the appearance of a Web site that
chides well-known stores for abandoning the word Christmas in favor of
holiday. The site, www.GrinchList.com, is run by a Virginia couple, Kirk and
Amy McElwain. Among the Christmas-averse stores they list are Macy's,
Bloomingdale's, the Discovery Store, KB Toys, and Home Depot. Companies
commended for not censoring the word Christmas include DisneyStore.com,
J.C. Penney, Rite Aid, Sears, Toys "R" Us, and Wal-Mart. The site says it's
odd that some big stores apparently think the word Christmas is divisive or
toxic when a large majority of Americans celebrate it--96 percent, according
to a recent Opinion Dynamics poll.

The McElwains wonder how Congress's "Capitol Christmas Tree" morphed
into a generic "Capitol Holiday Tree." Good question. The language change
appeared in the 1990s, but the far-flung investigative staff of this column has
not been able to locate any announcement, news story, or authorization for
the change. The architect of the Capitol's office is responsible for the tree, but
a spokeswoman there said she couldn't find anything in writing about the
change, who did it, or when it occurred. If anyone knows about this shifty
shift, this column's staff of telephone operators is standing by, eager to hear
from you. In the meantime, Merry Holiday, everyone.

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